I liked MOST of the story. The idea of someone who is skilled in data mining using Big Data to become an old-school prophet is a neat one. Futuretelling always has some interesting wrinkles, such as how she tried her best to avoid the future she saw but ended up walking right into it anyway.
Am I the only one who thought that the character DID find the Black Swan Question, the one her Buddhist friend asked. Okay, so I don't remember exactly what the question was, but it was something about questioning her motivations, yes? And what does she do--she kicks the guy to the curb, tells him to get the hell out. Because, like so many seeking truth or enlightenment she's not willing to exercise the flexibility of mind and sacrifice of control to accept the thing that's right in front of her. She doesn't want the truth, she wants the tranquility of mind that she imagines the truth will give her. But you don't find tranquility of mind by obsessively seeking something, you find tranquility of mind by striving for tranquility of mind. To take her tactic toward that is like trying to find Buddhist enlightenment by buying products on the home shopping channel--the path does not even go in the same direction as the goal, let alone having any chance of reaching it.
She also had an extremely flawed method of trying to find an enlightening question. I would've thought she would've had a solid background in Game Theory, but it doesn't seem that way because the way she set up the rules only people who can generate huge amounts of disposable money can request her services. So you're generally going to end up with people like multibillionaires for which that amount of money is a paltry sum, or you're going to end up with desperate gamblers who are throwing the money in the hopes of getting a return on their investment to make more. Those aren't the gruops that I would expect a profound and unprecedented question to come from. If she'd asked me I would've suggested she talk to some philosophers, monks, recluses, hermits, people who devote their lives to charity (like Mother Theresa if she were alive) because those are going to be the people most likely to not fit your consumerism-based predictive models.
Overall, I thought the story had a lot of promise, and I thought it was very interesting, but I was hoping that it would go somewhere in the end other than her continuing to wallow in self-pity at her own situation. But that didn't happen. Her rejection of the question given right to her is a telling moment but I was hoping for a moment of change in the story .